How wily wild turkeys struck it lucky in America

WE HUMANS have a fondness for calling someone or something we consider inept a “turkey”. Could turkeys talk, they might be inclined to throw the insult back the other way.

Ecologist Michael Chamberlain of the University of Georgia has witnessed the bird’s ability to outsmart people at first hand. He was in the field tracking a mother turkey and her poults. Thanks to the micro-GPS units he co-developed, he knew their exact whereabouts, and sent a fieldworker into the forest to find them. His colleague walked around for almost an hour trying to track them down, and never once spotted them. Chamberlain did, though. “I was sitting in the truck,” he says. Through the windshield, he saw the turkey sneak across the road with her brood, right in front of him. The fieldworker had been behind her the whole time, but she was clever enough to keep out of sight.

“Smart” isn’t a word most of us associate with the bird that graces many a Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner plate. Yet it is the domesticated cousin of the wily wild turkey, Meleagris gallopavo, which without its guile might well have gone the way of the passenger pigeon. However, in a heart-warming success story for conservation, this native American has made it back from the brink of extinction. Better yet, while many other species are feeling the heat of climate change, the wild turkey is going from strength to strength.

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Turkeys are native to North and Central America, with six regional subspecies. Although domesticated by the indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica some 2000 years ago, the wild variety was an important resource for many Native American peoples, not just for its meat and eggs, but also for feathers, bones and spurs, which were used to make clothing, spoons, musical instruments, arrow tips and more. Estimates put the wild turkey population before Columbus arrived at some 10 million, though no one was counting. Around 1600, when Europeans first began settling in North America, the wild birds were so abundant they could be seen in flocks of hundreds.

Ironically, early settlers brought domesticated turkeys with them – these were the descendants of Mesoamerican poultry that had been introduced to Europe by earlier explorers. But turkey farming was small-scale and settlers soon learned that wild turkeys were good tucker and easy prey, owing to their habit of roosting in large groups in trees. Turkeys became so established in the pioneer psyche that in 1784, commenting on the choice of the bald eagle as the national bird, Benjamin Franklin quipped: “The turkey is in comparison a much more respectable bird, and withal a true original native of America…He is besides, though a little vain and silly, a bird of courage, and would not hesitate to attack a grenadier of the British Guards.”

“In a warmer world we can expect to see more of these canny birds”

Despite such affection, the hunting of wild turkeys continued unregulated. And the birds faced another threat, too. Turkeys aren’t particular about where they live, but they do have one requirement: trees. As settlers crossed the country, logging for timber and clearing forest to create farmland, suitable turkey habitat diminished. All this unfettered felling and trapping meant that by the end of the 19th century – around the time that passenger pigeon populations began to plummet – the wild turkey was in trouble. By 1920, it had been eradicated in 18 of the 39 states it had once occupied, and had also disappeared from Ontario, Canada.

Estimates of the population size at its nadir range from 30,000 to 200,000. Yet, as the passenger pigeon was sucked into the vortex of extinction, concern arose about the disappearance of wild turkeys. This was especially fervent among those who liked to hunt them, and efforts were launched to bring the birds back from the brink. In 1937, these came to fruition when a new excise tax on guns and ammunition generated revenue earmarked for wildlife management and restoration. The wild turkey was to get a share.

Armed with conservation dollars, wildlife agencies in several US states began collecting turkey eggs from nests in the wild, bringing them into captivity to rear for later release. Two decades of time and money later, nothing had changed. Almost all of the efforts were “dismal failures”, says Tom Hughes, a biologist with the National Wild Turkey Federation – most of the young turkeys didn’t survive once released. “They hadn’t grown up under the direction of a wild hen,” says Hughes, so they had no idea how to behave in the wild. “They didn’t know what to avoid. They didn’t know what to look for.”

By 1960, most wild turkey breeding had been ditched. Instead, wildlife agencies used spring-loaded rocket nets to capture whole flocks and relocate them to a suitable turkey-free habitat. Bingo! Turkeys began spreading like wildfire. Able to adapt to new settings before potential predators had learned to hunt them, they enjoyed a honeymoon period in many places that enabled populations to establish and thrive, says Hughes.

Fast-forward to today, and wild turkeys are abundant across the continent, with numbers estimated at over 6 million. One factor that limits their northward expansion is snow. “When the snow is really deep, turkeys can’t move through it, and can’t find their food,” says Britney Niedzielski. While at Trent University in Peterborough, Canada, she found that many wild turkeys don’t survive the winter at the northern limits of their range. However, those hanging out near farms can often get enough spilt grain and corn to see them through.

And with a helping hand from climate change, wild turkeys are likely to spread further north, says Niedzielski. So, in a warmer world we can expect to see more of these canny birds… and fewer frozen ones.